During the 2019 BOINC workshop there was quite a lot of talk about people wanting to buy compute resources for their chosen projects, but not wanting to invest into hardware and take up the maintenance of it, for various reasons (difficulty setting up, high electricity costs, etc). Instead people would like to pay for cloud resources and adjust the donated amount as their income or engagement changes.

I went ahead and built the system for this: https://thescience.cloud/

It is very simple to start: just add money into your account, pick your projects and run as many computers as you wish. The computers are automatically started on a cloud provider and run for as long as you have money in your account. The computers get attached to your account (you have to add your weak account key), so all the BOINC credits also go to you and your team.

Supported payments methods are PayPal, ACH transfer in the United States, or SEPA transfer in European Union Eurozone. I add a small 7% markup which will hopefully cover PayPal fees, accounting costs and my hosting needs. 21% Lithuanian VAT for European Union / European Economic Area customers is included, this is run through a legal company I operate. Worldwide users currently do not have to pay tax based on Lithuanian law.

Special thanks to the initial testers from PrimeGrid's Discord!

What would be nice is maybe a table of pricing before creating an account.

Just what kind of computers (CPUs) are we getting for 7 USD a month?

So, from my perspective as someone who doesn't pay VAT, this is almost a 30% markup mainly for having BOINC set up for us? I'll go ahead and set up BOINC myself, thanks.

But I do hope you'll let us know if you find a reasonably-priced cloud provider that is happy about the load PrimeGrid can put on it.

I feel that you need more information on your webpage as to the CPU's that you will be running the BOINC instance on as it affects how the projects will run. The two CPU's that you have mentioned have different capabilities where one supports AVX2 and the other AVX512. This is one of the few BOINC projects where that will have much significance but it is relevant.

I can see good potential for you if you market it properly. You need to target those who don't know how to set up their own cloud servers or those who don't have the time to set them up yet want to contribute.

When I saw this post, I hoped it was the reverse of what it actually is. I was hoping it was a way for someone else to use my home computer to run their projects for a small fee (which would have to be less than cloud providers to not be exploited). As someone who lives in an area with very low electricity cost, this would be attractive to me and then I would feel less bad about leaving my computer on 24/7 crunching things. Of course, you would also have to have the fee be associated with families of processors, and have requirements around stolen CPU time, etc.
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When I saw this post, I hoped it was the reverse of what it actually is. I was hoping it was a way for someone else to use my home computer to run their projects for a small fee (which would have to be less than cloud providers to not be exploited). As someone who lives in an area with very low electricity cost, this would be attractive to me and then I would feel less bad about leaving my computer on 24/7 crunching things. Of course, you would also have to have the fee be associated with families of processors, and have requirements around stolen CPU time, etc.

You could do this on your own thru PayPal or something with a user giving you their user name and password and you crunching for them for x number of days for y cost. Alot of trust between people going on though would probably prevent some people from doing it.

I can see the OP's way of doing it though for challenges and other short term things. I could boost my crunching power for 2 weeks for example.

Which is why a coordinated marketplace would be much more attractive. When most of what you need is CPU power, why necessarily bother with a cloud provider when you can distribute the cloud over the world and create a true marketplace for compute resources? Potentially a project for me to put together once I retire.

An update regarding the tax: the tax situation has changed and I am no longer applying 21% VAT rate for participants from outside of the European Union / European Economic Area, as per Lithuanian law. This means that for a lot participants this has become significantly cheaper.

Would it be difficult to provide an option to to not keep a work queue?

Thanks for the good words!

Project preferences do apply, however, I fix some most common mistakes such as not running at 100% CPU or not using all of the available disk space using the preferences override files.

Sometimes there are "slow" instances that most likely run more demanding workloads from other customers on the same device. In case you encounter such an instance, I suggest to shut it down using the graceful shutdown option, and recreate it.

I will be adding monitoring so this process could get automated in the future.

Is it normal that now instance connect with PrimeGrid server once in every minute?